Politics turns out to be far downstream of culture. Doctrinal conservatives stormed the three branches of government handily enough, but not Hollywood, the publishing industry, academia and other trades that form our habits of mind without our knowing it.
Albert Camus said: “When a war breaks out, people say “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be ‘too stupid’, that doesn’t prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.” Indeed it is true.
Those who hold different views are “deranged.” They’re criminals. Dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed to hold jobs where they might have some influence over others. They need to be forced into hard labor and sent to re-education camps.
You don’t hear these influencers say, “That Communist Party of China is great—we ought to let it run the show!” Instead, they’ll say “doing business with the CCP is good ol’ free market capitalism.” But everything they say and do advances the aims of the CCP
The lesson here is quite clear. When the government launches massive interventions into the economy, political distortions will result in costs disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in society and benefits that skew toward the well-connected.
The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, “But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?”
The state, in the form of police violence, is asserting its power to control the population. Once you begin to see like a state, you recognize that failing to use violence to exert control would deny the nature, and in fact the very self-justification, of the enforcement power.
Markets discerned that the virus wasn’t terribly lethal. If it had been, there’s no way that U.S. equity markets would have reached all-time highs in late February. Again, markets don’t wait for politicians to respond, nor do they wait for doctors and entities like the CDC.
The COVID disaster and the Iraq War fit a familiar pattern. As the historian Paul Johnson has observed, most of the worst events of the 20th century were perpetrated by experts who used collective power to shape world events in a direction they believed was beneficial.
It is the individual that matters, not the collective that he or she belongs to. Only an individual can act to pursue his or her own happiness. A collective does not have feelings of happiness or anything else. Only individuals do.
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